Hybridity and change in Turkish inflectional morphology

Abstract The agreement morpheme in the Turkish verbal domain surfaces in different paradigms depending on the preceding TAM marker. Kornfilt (1996) has proposed that this difference in spell-out signals a deeper syntactic difference, in that z -paradigm but not k -paradigm agreement morphemes are preceded by a silent copula. The present study is concerned with yet another, more recently documented paradigm attested in colloquial speech. Its key empirical finding is that these new forms are hybrids that share properties with both the k - and the z -paradigm. Its main theoretical claim is that this finding also affects our understanding of the older two sets of forms. Accordingly, the paper develops a novel allomorphy analysis of the three agreement paradigms. The allomorphy grammar proposed here and Kornfilt’s copula grammar can coexist within a single speaker, and the former might have developed diachronically out of the latter.